Kai Zhu
@kai-zzzzzz.bsky.social
📤 75
📥 301
📝 26
Assistant Professor at Bocconi University
https://kaizhu.me/
pinned post!
📣 Thrilled to announce our new paper, "Monetizing Platforms: An Empirical Analysis of Supply and Demand Responses to Entry Costs in Two-Sided Markets," is now published in Management Science! When a digital platform starts charging for access, who wins and who loses? 🧵👇
4 months ago
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Joost Rietveld
2 days ago
What happens to ecosystem diversity and
#platform
match quality after a platform introduces paid
#discovery
tools (e.g., Apple's search result ads)?
@kai-zzzzzz.bsky.social
and co-authors share insights from
#Goodreads
introduction of paid book giveaways.
platformpapers.substack.com/p/the-price-...
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The Price of Platform Participation
Goodreads’ introduction of paid giveaways reveals how charging for discovery affects ecosystem diversity and match quality.
https://platformpapers.substack.com/p/the-price-of-platform-participation
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Francesca Cesari
about 2 months ago
🧪 Women are represented as younger than men across occupations/social roles in data from Google,Wikipedia,IMDB, Flickr,YouTube and LLMs.The bias is strongest for occupations with high status/earnings.ChatGPT perpetuates this bias when generating and evaluating resumes.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models - Nature
Stereotypes of age-related gender bias are socially distorted, as evidenced by the age gap in the representations of women and men across various media and algorithms, despite no systematic age differences in the workforce.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09581-z
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Translation technology is incredible — it’s the #1 AI use case, and I’ve believed that for years. The demand is huge, and the tools are almost there. With better interactive UI design, the upside for society will be significant.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/t...
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The New AirPods Can Translate Languages in Your Ears. This Is Profound.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/technology/personaltech/new-airpods-language-translation-feature.html?smid=bs-share
2 months ago
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Kai Zhu
Alex Engler
3 months ago
This
@beijingpalmer.bsky.social
post reminded me I have been meaning to update
@pewresearch.org
's estimate of total newspaper newsroom jobs - which was 30,820 as of 2020 Using BLS OEWS data (w/ same methodology as Pew) the 2024 number is 29,260 - down another 5%
www.pewresearch.org/chart/sotnm-...
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Diane Coyle
4 months ago
Call for papers, 4th UK Workshop on Digital Economics, London 28 November 2025:
competitionpolicy.ac.uk/events/4th-w...
This is always a great event
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Centre for Competition Policy
High quality independent research into competition policy and regulation
https://competitionpolicy.ac.uk/events/4th-workshop-on-digital-economics/
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Ryan McGrady
3 months ago
I wrote an article about linguistic bias and the internet for the BBC, based on a paper
@ze.vin
,
@ethanz.bsky.social
, and I wrote comparing four language-specific samples of YouTube.
www.bbc.com/future/artic...
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How language is hiding the real internet from you
Most of the internet is out of your reach, but the barrier isn't just algorithms. In another language, the same platforms turn into whole other worlds.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250812-how-language-is-hiding-the-real-internet-from-you
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John Holbein
3 months ago
Want a good starting point for learning good principles of Dataviz? I'd highly recommend
@andrew.heiss.phd
course--Data Visualization with R. Reading materials, slides, lecture videos, examples, code, etc. are all posted for free on his website.
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Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.
8 months ago
Got around to pushing all my
@cuboulder.info
Web Data Science
@jupyter.org
notebooks to
@github.com
Enjoy!
github.com/cuinfoscienc...
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Kai Zhu
Joe Noonan
4 months ago
There have been a number of recent articles on statistical power in quantitative political science. This is something that I think deserves more attention and discussion. A short thread of the articles I have read. 🧵
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Kai Zhu
Cloudflare
4 months ago
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-i...
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Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-undeclared-crawlers-to-evade-website-no-crawl-directives/
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📣 Thrilled to announce our new paper, "Monetizing Platforms: An Empirical Analysis of Supply and Demand Responses to Entry Costs in Two-Sided Markets," is now published in Management Science! When a digital platform starts charging for access, who wins and who loses? 🧵👇
4 months ago
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Kai Zhu
Paul Hünermund
4 months ago
Inspiring PDW on using sensitivity analysis in empirical management research. My contribution is to present the sensemakr package by Cinelli & Hazlett (2020) for observational designs. Thanks a lot to the organizers for putting this fantastic session together.
#AOM2025
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Kai Zhu
The Upshot
4 months ago
Where the cuts are going to be felt the most.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
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Where Congress’s Cuts Threaten Access to PBS and NPR
The loss of federal funding threatens scores of public TV and radio stations across the United States.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/18/business/media/house-rescission-vote-pbs-npr.html
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Rohit Lamba
5 months ago
24/ An excellent recent survey revisits the theoretical literature on herds & cascades It notes that cascades cause poor information aggregation, lead to fragile mass behaviors, and remain central to understanding social learning. Those 1992 papers launched a vast literature 😎
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Julia M. Rohrer
6 months ago
Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.
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Tal B. Lavin
6 months ago
its crazy how dominant germany was in science (especially chemistry) in the 19th century, it was basically the international language for scientists, people came from all over the world to train at heidelberg etc, and then....
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Prism
6 months ago
Wikipedia may seem like an unlikely site of resistance, but in an era of escalating censorship, disinformation, & erosion of public trust, Wikipedia is a model for collective governance led by next generation of cultural workers,
@alexmar.bsky.social
reports:
prismreports.org/2025/05/12/w...
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How museums are using Wikipedia to archive marginalized art
As public archival institutions fade and the state rewrites curricula, the next generation of cultural workers is stepping up
https://prismreports.org/2025/05/12/wikipedia-art-archiving-pamm/
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Hannah Li
7 months ago
Just out in WWW last week! 📜Our work on substitution patterns between Wikipedia and ChatGPT. We find *heterogeneous* impacts, where Wiki articles that are similar to ChatGPT outputs see a greater drop in views than dissimilar articles:
arxiv.org/abs/2503.00757
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Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT
How has Wikipedia activity changed for articles with content similar to ChatGPT following its introduction? We estimate the impact using differences-in-differences models, with dissimilar Wikipedia ar...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00757
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Jürgen Pfeffer
7 months ago
Have you ever asked yourself about the overall extent of TikTok? Here some numbers from "Just Another Hour on TikTok" - Great compliment to
@bendavidsteel.bsky.social
for this data collection effort! w/
@miriamschirmer.bsky.social
& Derek Ruths
arxiv.org/abs/2504.13279
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD
8 months ago
Climate Terminology Does Not Matter Across tens of thousands of participants in two large-scale experiments, we found that labeling climate change in different ways had no effect on their stated willingness to act.
jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/climate-te...
via
@dgoldwert.bsky.social
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Climate Terminology Does Not Matter
Our new paper finds that swapping out one climate term for another does not meaningfully change people’s stated commitment to fight climate change
https://jayvanbavellab.substack.com/p/climate-terminology-does-not-matter?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=387222&post_id=160427589&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=j3b37&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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John Holbein
8 months ago
Wow! Three scholars at Columbia, Michigan, & Maryland just introduced a measure of the partisan leanings of employers in the U.S. The data is constructed by linking voter registrations to online worker profiles. VRscores capture the political affiliations of 21.8M workers across 2.6M employers.
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Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.
8 months ago
Awesome post by
@molly.wiki
on the tensions of free knowledge production and commons in the face of extractive technologies like AI.
www.citationneeded.news/free-and-ope...
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“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn't AI using open knowledge — it's AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
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Excited to share our revised working paper on Machine-assisted Content Creation on Peer Production Platforms—we have made significant changes and additions! Our study explores how AI-powered translation reshapes multilingual content creation on platforms like Wikipedia.
9 months ago
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Kai Zhu
Kurt Munz
10 months ago
Bocconi Marketing is hiring a rookie professor of consumer behavior. Apply by Feb 28.
jobmarket.unibocconi.eu?id=747
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Kai Zhu
Clément S. Bellet
10 months ago
New paper with amazing Eve Coslon-Sihra, "Does Inequality Affect the Needs of the Poor?" now published in the JEEA! We show inequality redefines needs at the bottom of the pyramid, deepening the calorie consumption puzzle and worsening malnutrition. A thread below ⬇️
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Maria Antoniak
11 months ago
It's ready! 💫 A new blog post in which I list of all the tools and apps I've been using for work, plus all my opinions about them.
maria-antoniak.github.io/2024/12/30/o...
Featuring
@kagi.com
,
@warp.dev
,
@paperpile.bsky.social
,
@are.na
, Fantastical,
@obsidian.md
, Claude, and more.
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Thomas Simonini
10 months ago
We’re launching a FREE course on LLM Agents 🥳 📖 Learn what Agents are 🕵️ Build your own Agents using the latest libraries and tools. 🎓 Earn a certificate of completion to showcase your achievement. Enroll now 👉
huggingface.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=...
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Alex Imas
10 months ago
Ambitious and important JMP from Ruchi Mahadeshwar (with Alex Zhou) at Brown. They use experimental variation and a structural model to show that 1) on margin, disutility from sex work is *16* times that of non-sex work and 2) labor supply of sex work is v. elastic.
drive.google.com/file/d/15oXa...
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Andrey Fradkin
11 months ago
It's a good time to mention that Seth Benzell and I have a podcast called Justified Posteriors discussing the economics of AI and other technologies. Our latest episode considers
@timobres.bsky.social
's paper on AI and Aggregate Growth.
empiricrafting.substack.com/p/beyond-tas...
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Beyond Task Replacement
Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Aggregate Growth Prospects by Tim Bresnahan
https://empiricrafting.substack.com/p/beyond-task-replacement
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Kai Zhu
Maria Antoniak
11 months ago
Turns out there are multiple existing packages to help you to scrape videos from TikTok outside of the API. Not hard and a bunch of research groups are doing it. No excuse for all the web and social media and computational social scientists to keep ignoring this vast platform.
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Kai Zhu
Daron Acemoglu
11 months ago
This is a thread about remaking the tech sector.
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Daron Acemoglu
11 months ago
As a result, we have a new phenomenon: news deserts, which are areas where communities lack access to credible local news sources, once again damaging democracy and civic citizenship:
cmpf.eui.eu/news-deserts...
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Kai Zhu
Martin Gerlach
11 months ago
📣The Call for Papers for the 12th edition of Wiki Workshop is out📣 Submit your 2-page extended abstract of your research about Wikimedia projects by March 9! All submissions are non-archival (ongoing, completed, already published works are welcome). More info:
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Wo...
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J. Nathan Matias
11 months ago
What does a trustworthy tech governance system look like? I spent the break asking this question when removing a moth cocoon from an air sensor I use to manage my asthma. Along the way, I saw the most democratic flowchart I’ve ever seen. Here's the story:
natematias.medium.com/democracy-is...
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Democracy is a Data Schema
Learning from the EPA about trustworthy tech governance
https://natematias.medium.com/democracy-is-a-data-schema-1798b6bbd6bc
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I should be working on my paper revision, but I could not stop myself from pulling relevant data and creating this plot: Elon Musk's Wokepedia attack seems to act as a surprisingly effective call for donations!
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11 months ago
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Peter Gleick
11 months ago
If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control.
www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-ta...
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Elon Musk takes aim at Wikipedia
The billionaire has become one of the most prominent supporters of President-elect Donald Trump.
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-takes-aim-wikipedia-fund-raising-editing-political-woke-2005742
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The Upshot
11 months ago
"America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life."
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
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Insurers Are Dropping Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen
Without insurance, it’s impossible to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/climate/insurance-non-renewal-climate-crisis.html
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American Political Science Review
11 months ago
Just published on APSR First View: "Exposure to Mass Shootings and Voting Directly on Gun Policy" by G. Agustin Markarian and Benjamin J. Newman.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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AEA Journals
11 months ago
Forthcoming in the AER: "Ownership Concentration and Strategic Supply Reduction" by Ulrich Doraszelski, Katja Seim, Michael Sinkinson, and Peichun Wang.
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
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Ownership Concentration and Strategic Supply Reduction
(Forthcoming Article) - We explore the implications of ownership concentration for the recently concluded incentive auction that re-purposed spectrum from broadcast TV to mobile broadband usage in the...
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20162018&from=f
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Giovanni Compiani
12 months ago
🚨📜CALL FOR PAPERS 📜🚨 *New Data for Consumer Insights Conference* When: May 30-31, 2025 Where: Chicago Booth Submission Deadline: Jan 6, 2025 Keynotes:
@susanathey.bsky.social
and Greg Lewis Both methodological and empirical submissions are welcome. Submit here:
ndconference2025.hotcrp.com
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New Data Conference 2025
http://ndconference2025.hotcrp.com
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Peter Hull
12 months ago
new WP y'all
www.nber.org/papers/w33236
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Maria Antoniak
12 months ago
And now a very practical talk that experiments with different LLMs, finetuned baselines, off-the-shelf tools, dataset sizes, and prompts on curated non-English historical data. "Extracting Social Connections from Finnish Karelian Refugee Interviews Using LLMs" presented by Jenna Kanerva
#chr2024
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Computational Humanities Research 2024
https://2024.computational-humanities-research.org/papers/paper52/
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Joshua Gans
12 months ago
A somewhat different Data Colada post today criticising popular empirical method in political science.
datacolada.org/121
The bit that caught my eye: an editor told an author not to post anonymous reviews rejecting a paper. Let me tell you why that is crazy. 🧵
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[121] Dear Political Scientists: Don't Bin, GAM Instead - Data Colada
There is a 2019 paper, in the journal Political Analysis (htm), with over 1000 Google cites, titled "How Much Should We Trust Estimates from Multiplicative Interaction Models? Simple Tools to Improve ...
https://datacolada.org/121
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Amy Zhang
12 months ago
In collab w/ Semantic Scholar, we conducted a large scale (800+) survey of researcher usage and perceptions of LLMs for science. Major findings: +Most are using LLMs already, mostly for writing +LLMs seem to be a win for research equity +But some groups, like women, have more ethical concerns too
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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
12 months ago
Economists love using linear regression to estimate treatment effects — it turns out that there are perils to this method, but also amazing perks Come with me in this 🧵 if you want to learn about our now-published paper "Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions!" 1/ (Twitter rerun!)
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Kenneth C Wilbur
12 months ago
“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more than I value the specific contents”
lithub.com/in-praise-of...
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In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse
When the witty and wry English fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ in 1995, only 39% of Americans had access to a home computer. According to the Pew Research Center, the…
https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-print-why-reading-remains-essential-in-an-era-of-epistemological-collapse/
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Darin Self
12 months ago
Every person who has had to teach a Gen Zer how to use R
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Alex Imas
12 months ago
Totally agree with
@shengwuli.bsky.social
. The broader point is that I think we need to directly address the elephant in the room: the *huge* impact of context--i.e., seemingly irrelevant factors--on choice and beliefs. 🧵 on the behavioral economics of context, with some new data at the end.
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Adam L
12 months ago
Link to the book, which I highly recommend:
www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...
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Learning Microeconometrics with R | Christopher P. Adams | Taylor & Fr
This book provides an introduction to the field of microeconometrics through the use of R. The focus is on applying current learning from the field to real
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9780429288333/learning-microeconometrics-christopher-adams
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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
12 months ago
Man I cannot endorse this abstract more
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